Favorite Halloweens

Halloweens Past…
I grew up on a horseshoe-shaped dirt road in Michigan. Most of the houses on our road had kids in them, and our road was a great place for trick-or-treating. There were only two far-apart streetlights, lots of trees and shadowy yards, and almost every house was open for visitors.
My dad would bring an enormous flashlight and the cats would follow along behind us as we canvassed the neighborhood. Our favorite house was one we called “The Long Driveway.” Dad stood at the end of it and we entered the long, dark drive as a pack of terrified, thrilled kids. I suppose the driveway wasn’t really that long, but since we couldn’t see the house from the road, it seemed truly scary!
One of our neighbors had a little white barbershop (with a striped pole, of course) in his front yard. He gave out homemade suckers. Our own family’s homemade treat was popcorn balls. I remember the year that we started to put tags on them with our name and phone number. People all of a sudden had gotten scared of their kids taking homemade goodies.
Halloweens More Recent…
Our road is similar to the one I grew up on, except we have no streetlights and the Long Driveway house is gated. Although more kids have moved in (and birthed in!) to the neighborhood lately, the street is dominated by older folks with grown kids. A growing number of our neighbors are weekend people, as property values rose and families looked elsewhere. Most of the kids go to other neighborhoods to trick-or-treat.
When our son was in preschool, I took him to downtown Santa Cruz every year to see the costumes and get a few treats. He didn’t actually like candy, so we were mostly there for the experience. He didn’t want to go out trick-or-treating till he was about four. It may have been that year or the next that we started a short-lived tradition with neighbors who moved away last year.
When our son was ready to start going out in the evening, these neighbors invited all the kids on our end of the block to go together. We arrived at their house to find a glass of wine and the parents dressed up even goofier than the kids. We mosied around the neighborhood, going mostly to the houses of people we knew. (Most of the others were dark.) One of our neighbors, who raised her own kids on our street, was particularly eager to see us because knowing that our son didn’t like candy, she’d gone out and gotten him a helium balloon! Another neighbor had a bowl of oddities that she’d collected over the years; our son chose a painted egg that he still treasures. Another neighbor had standard candy but offered refills for our wine glasses!
We approached one house that was all lit up and welcoming, though we didn’t know the people who lived there. A woman threw the door open and happily announced, “I’ve been waiting for you for ten years!”
This Year…
Our fun neighbors moved away, another girl is out of town due to a family emergency, and it looks like we’re going to go it alone. But I think we’ll resist the temptation to go to a busier neighborhood. At least some of our neighbors are waiting for us with a special treat or at least a smile and a few kind words. And who knows…the gate may just be open on the Long Driveway.

The Homeschooling Attitude

I was chatting with a bunch of other homeschooling moms and the words came out of my mouth before I realized that they were a true insight into our family. I said, “Even before we started homeschooling, we were a homeschooling family.” As with many things I say, I wasn’t completely clear on what I meant till most of the sentence had made its way out of my mouth!
What I meant by it is that we’ve never been the family that thinks you should pop out the kids and then ignore them, or the family that thinks learning is a chore and other people (teachers) should be in charge of it, or the family that eats dinner in front of our separate TVs.
We have always been the family that relishes new discoveries, that tries to turn daily life into interesting lessons, and that acknowledges that togetherness is worth the friction it necessarily causes. This is the homeschooling lifestyle.
From before our oldest could speak, we talked to him about pretty much everything. And, as one babysitter noted with surprise, we never spoke babytalk. This was not an unconscious decision. My husband cringes when he hears others speak to our kids like they are from some other species that can’t quite think right. And we both have a pat answer to people who ask us questions about our kids in their presence: “I don’t know — why don’t you ask them?”
I’ve noticed that I’m the parent in a classroom who talks to kids about things they’re interested in using words that they probably don’t yet understand. How else to get them to understand new words than use them in a conversation that they’re interested in? If a kid has discovered how cool gravity is, it’s no use trying to explain the concepts in babytalk. We just use the words that actually describe what’s happening.
Consequently, when our children talk, they use words that people aren’t used to hearing from people their size. When he was four, my son and I went to buy a terrarium. When the nice pet store employee asked him directly what he wanted to buy, he answered, “We’re looking for a terrarium for a fence lizard.” The employee was stunned: “He knows that word?” Well, of course! What else would you keep a fence lizard in?
My daughter recently went into a monologue with an adult where she explained all about resistors and how they worked. The adults on the receiving end often remark how “smart” our kids are. I don’t disagree, but that’s really not the point. Our kids are interested in things because we are. Just like they tell you in parenting class, you need to model the behavior.
The homeschooling family has made a conscious choice to model lifelong learning in their house. Homeschooled kids are dragged along to all sorts of situations that other kids aren’t, and it has a big effect on them. I brought my daughter to a dental appointment, which I’d never had to do when she was in school. My dentist had a great time showing her how he could put videos of the inside of my mouth up on a TV in the room. She was fascinated, well-behaved because she wasn’t told to sit in the corner. She became part of what was happening.
From an early age, our daughter had to go for very difficult yearly tests at Stanford Hospital. It was truly awful for us, but we always made it an event for her. We let her plan the day as much as possible. And when the procedure was happening we didn’t just tell her it would be over soon; we pointed out all the interesting parts of it that she could take part in (and be distracted by). Consequently, she has been saying since she was three that she wants to be a doctor, and anytime she gets a chance she learns about the human body and how it functions.
When I started her in homeschool last year, I was pleasantly surprised to find families who were all a variation on our theme. Not that we’re all alike – far from it! – but we all have the attitude that we are part of our children’s learning. So even if you aren’t homeschooling, you might just be a homeschooling family. Think about it…

No on 8

I hadn’t done much thinking about CA State Proposition 8, the ballot initiative titled “Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry”. I knew which way I was going to vote and I knew that its support statewide would be lopsided: little support here on the coast, big support in the vast conservative Central Valley.
But the other day I was in a public place and I spied a woman I know casually — her kids and mine have been in activities together. On her shirt she had pinned a button: “Yes on 8”.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, a yes vote on Proposition 8 would take away the right for same sex couples to legally marry in the state of California. Prop 8 supporters went to court to try to get the title changed, because they knew that even people who disapprove of homosexuality are hesitant to vote to “take away” a right. But the court upheld the description as valid.
I was shocked and taken aback when I saw this woman’s opinion pinned on her shirt. Santa Cruz is a notoriously liberal place, and this woman doesn’t seem at all out of place here. In fact, without revealing details about her because my intention isn’t to rail at her personally, one aspect of her personal biography is likely to make her more unwilling to take rights away from people who aren’t like the majority. Had she been born in a previous generation, she would have been victim to similar laws.
Seeing that button made me consider the reasons for my opposition to Prop 8. Obviously, it has a lot to do with my general political leanings and with the company I keep. From my earliest memories, I didn’t understand what the big deal was. I never had to consider whether I thought homosexuals “deserved” equal rights, because the idea fundamentally made no sense to me.
But that part of my reasoning wouldn’t be particularly persuasive to people who are members of churches that tell them weekly that homosexuality is evil, or who fear the “otherness” of the gay people they see in the news, getting “illegally” married in San Francisco or marching outlandishly dressed in gay pride parades.
The other half of my reasoning, which has nothing to do with feelings or morality, is that civil marriage, despite the fact that we connect it with religious marriage, is really unconnected. We have religious marriage for reasons that differ slightly depending on the religion that performs it. Some religions choose to “sanctify” any relationship, and thus choose to perform same sex marriages. Some religions only perform heterosexual marriage, and may even impose other restrictions. At least one religion practiced in this country sanctified marriages between one man and multiple wives.
This is the right of every religious group, to decide what sorts of relationships to accept amongst their followers.
This sort of preferential giving out of rights, however, is not something that our government is allowed to do. Our Constitution very clearly states that all citizens have the same rights. The interpretation of equal rights has changed as our society has changed — this is natural. But the basic fact that we all get the same rights has not changed.
A good example of how the interpretation of “equal rights” has changed with our society is in voting rights. When our country was first established, only land-owning men of European descent were allowed to vote. Slowly, as our society has changed, we have included more and more people as having that common right.
In the case of civil marriage, despite what churches were willing to sanctify throughout our history, our government has applied a consistent standard to who can marry: We have civil marriage solely for the purpose of setting up a legal relationship between two people who are not related, who want to become family members.
The purpose of civil marriage has never been to sanctify, or give approval, or assert any sort of morality. The state has an interest in having civil relations set up so that the process of dealing with family issues is easier. When parents are married, it’s clear who is responsible for the children after a divorce. When two adults are married and legal decisions need to be made for one of them, it is clear who gets to make those decisions.
Because same-sex relationships have gone from being hidden to being acknowledged in most places in our country, our law needs to follow suit. It’s got nothing to do with morality or choice. We have kids who need the law to offer them the same protection it offers the kids of heterosexual marriage. And a legal relationship between adults makes it clear who is legally allowed to make decisions in the case of death or sickness.
Our courts now recognize that a change in society has renewed the meaning of equal rights, once again, as it has been renewed over and over as our society has evolved. This attempt to roll back the inevitable is not only unfair and discriminatory; it’s just not good law.

Food Fights

When our son was a baby, we followed the rules set forth by every baby book: introduce solid foods one at a time. Make purees of each food and make sure he’s not allergic before moving on to the next.

Diligently I went through the basic foods, and predictably, he spit them all out.

Sometime in the middle of this exercise, my husband and I took him to our favorite dim sum restaurant over the hill. He sat there in his bucket carseat and the food started to arrive at our table. As the scent of the food reached him, his eyes widened, he sniffed, and he literally started licking his lips!

“How far away is the nearest hospital?” I asked my husband.

“About five minutes,” he said. “Go for it!”

So I mashed up bits of dim sum and put them in his mouth. At the first bite, his arms and legs started thrashing wildly. More! More! he gestured with an open mouth.

He ate an incredible amount of food that day, and we gave up on the single food purees. Instead, we got a portable food masher, and he would eat what we were eating. We would take him to our favorite Thai restaurant and mash up the food for him. The waitress was amazed. “That baby eats spicy Thai food?” she asked. “What do Thai babies eat?” we answered. “Thai food,” she said. “But American babies don’t like spicy food.”

Well, that baby did.

Arrive the second child, who teaches you that everything you thought you were doing right before was actually 180 degrees wrong. He loved his single food purees. He loved avocados, plain tofu, plain rice. Then cashews, seaweed, squid and peanut butter. Pasta and sauce are great, but they must be separate. He’s almost six, but things are his plate must not touch.

Everything we knew about feeding a baby and small child were reversed. And I could no longer congratulate myself that we didn’t raise “picky” children.

Our older son, who will eat almost every type of fruit, vegetable, ethnic food, or unusual food, is a gourmet. You might think this is great; however, try feeding a kid who prefers homegrown baby lettuce when you’re traveling in the heartland.

When he was in preschool, we brought homemade cookies to a party. Another family brought store-bought cookies dyed an array of lovely colors. I watched him pick up a pink cookie, take a bite, then with a slight grimace, carefully place it on the table and take one of the cookies we’d made. These days he’s in love with Trader Joe’s packaged noodle boxes, so he does eat some packaged food. But when faced with badly prepared food or nothing at all, he’s happy to go hungry and get cranky.

Our younger is a more classic “picky eater,” but his pickiness is rather eclectic. He’ll happily eat a sheet of nori seaweed. For years a favorite thing was edamame. And one of his favorite things ever is plain, boiled squid rings.

Lately, they’ve been making things quite difficult with a new rule that caught their parents unawares: Whatever the younger one loves, the older refuses to eat; whatever is one’s favorite, the other says is just plain yuck. This tactic drove us crazy for months till I realized that I just had to point out the obvious: OK, which one of you won’t eat pizza? (Neither wanted to give THAT up.) I guess one of you can’t have ice cream because we only have vanilla. (Solved with a bit of chocolate milk powder on top.)

But despite our little troubles and compromises, I think we did a pretty good job of getting them through the years when kids learn to think that they should be picky. We followed some pretty simple rules:

1) Mom should eat all her favorite stinky food when she’s breastfeeding. When I read that I wasn’t supposed to eat garlic because it might turn the baby off breastmilk, I knew I was going to disregard that advice. In fact, with both babies we made a point of getting Thai takeout the first week.

2) Don’t try to feed a baby anything they’re not attracted to. It’s not the right time to set up a battle.

3) Dr. B’s Breakfast Rule got us through that rough period in both kids’ lives when they didn’t want to eat before leaving the house for school or an activity. Instead of fighting them, simply say, “If you don’t eat breakfast, you will be hungry.” Then let them go hungry. At some point, their brains will make the connection, and they’ll start eating. Both of mine finally did.

4) Offer everything to your kids and assume they’ll like it. A positive attitude goes a long way.

5) Let kids have dislikes. I won’t touch goat cheese, so can I complain that my son doesn’t like avocado?

6) Serve your kids good food! Kids brought up on bland, over-salted and -sweetened packaged food are going to have very narrow horizons when it comes to the array of wonderful things to eat in this world.

Art for Kids’ Sakes

One of our favorite family activities happens for three weekends once a year — Open Studios. We are really lucky to live in a place that has such a great variety of working artists. From the little pictures in the catalog (which you can buy at pretty much any bookstore in town, as well as art supply stores), it’s hard to tell what your kids might like. So we do a combination of revisiting our favorites and making nearly random stabs in the dark.
As much as I wanted his first word to be “kitty,” I believe our son’s first word was “this.” He pronounced it very cutely as “dis” and it referred to pretty much anything he thought was interesting. When he was still riding face out in a Baby Bjorn, we took him to his first Open Studios. He very quickly made his opinions clear: some artists would get a few “dis”s — others, silence. Upon entering a room at one of our favorite stops, the funky and populous 17th Avenue Studios, he started kicking his feet and pointing in amazement. “Dis!” he told me. “Dis!” He just adored the paintings on the wall, which I admit, did nothing for me.
So clearly we can’t predict our children’s taste, but we try to stretch them past wanting to go to yet another artist who does cute pictures of dogs. This is a pretty easy thing to do. Moto Ohtake (motoohtake.com) does fabulous metal sculptures that rotate and glimmer in the sun. Our celebrated National Geographic photographer Frans Lanting (lanting.com) often opens up his studio (not this year, though). His photographs are awesome and the studio is fun to visit.
One of our favorites is Andrea Rich (andrearich.com) who does amazing woodcuts of animals from around the world. Ben Llano Hecht, who runs Seven Directions (sevendirections.org) art classes for kids, does huge, wonderful encaustic paintings. (Encaustic is using wax to imbed artifacts onto a surface.) He not only does fascinating art, but your kids will be mesmerized by his pets, including a tarantula, a scorpion, and a parrot my kids were convinced was saying “banana.”
My old friend Daniella Woolf (daniellawoolf.com) also does encaustic in a completely different manner and environment. My kids love going there every year to see Daniella at work in her studio, which is full of her collections of artifacts that she embeds onto her canvases. Photographer Tom Cannon takes beautiful photographs, but the draw for the kids is Tom’s kind nature (he’s a teacher) and his collections of natural artifacts that he gathers from our woods and beaches. Another artist we love to see at work (she’s unfortunately not open this year) is Petcharee Tamawong, who practices the traditional Thai art of carving fruits and vegetables.
It’s good to pepper your studio visits with ones where you know the kids will be able to interact with the art. Aaron VandeKerckhove’s work, in miniature, hangs over our daughter’s bed. We first started visiting his studio when he was doing mobiles. He’s grown since then… Now his pieces are often big enough to climb in. And unlike at a museum, he wants visitors to interact with his art, especially the wonderful tower that kids can climb up inside. I hope for his sake that he sells it at some point, but until then, we love to visit it yearly! (See apvsculpture.com.)
I have found that a number of printmakers will let visitors to their studios create a work of art, either by using a plate they’ve already made, or by letting them create their own. We have prints made by both of our kids in Eva Bernstein’s studio, part of the huge collective of artists on 17th Avenue. Eva was so kind to our kids, and took lots of time even when there were adults, possible buyers, in the room. (See 17thavenuestudios.com.)
I just love seeing my kids get so excited about art. We get to explore cool places in our county that we didn’t know existed. And if the kids start complaining… there’s always the treats that the artists kindly put out for their wayward visitors.

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